NEW YORK (Reuters) - Three-quarters of Americans, the world's largest polluters, plan to be more environmentally responsible in 2008 by reducing household energy or recycling more, a survey showed on Monday.

 

Half of those polled said they would make a "green" New Year's resolution, according to the survey by GfK Roper and commissioned by marketing consultancy Tiller LLC.

 

Two-thirds of Americans plan to cut their use of household chemicals, while 42 percent said they would take reusable fabric bags to the supermarket to reduce the use of plastic bags.

 

"When it comes to life choices, green is clearly a primary color. Americans are viewing the environmental impact of their actions with increased responsibility and deliberation," said Rob Densen, chief executive of Tiller.

 

But Densen added: "New Year's resolutions being what they are, let's hope that Americans are more successful at reducing waste and energy consumption than we are at reducing our waistlines."

 

The telephone survey of 1,004 s was conducted between December 7 and December 9. The margin for error is plus or minus 3.0 percent.

 

The United States has faced criticism abroad for refusing to sign on to the Kyoto climate change agreement and for its fossil-fuel consuming habits. But Washington agreed last week to be part of international negotiations on a new pact to fight global warming that will follow Kyoto beyond 2012.

 

U.N. climate experts say that warming, blamed mainly on greenhouse gases emitted by burning fossil fuels, will bring more drought, heat waves, floods and rising seas.

 

The survey found one-third of respondents felt guilty in recent years about not living a more environmentally friendly lifestyle. "Guilt is not going to save the environment, but at least it's a step in the right direction," Densen said.

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NAIROBI (Reuters) - Industrialized countries have a moral responsibility to help Africa mitigate the effects of climate change, Kenya's Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai said on Friday.

 

"For the global South, especially Africa, environmental issues are not a luxury," the environmental activist said in an article in Kenya's Business Daily newspaper on the final day of climate change talks in Bali.

 

"Arresting the world's warming and protecting and restoring our natural systems are issues of life and for much of the world's population."

 

The first African woman and 'green' activist to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004, Maathai said the industrialized world needed to work with southern hemisphere nations to stop the devastation linked to global warming.

 

Maathai said Africa's greenhouse gas emissions could not be compared with those of industrialized nations, yet it was Africa that would be crippled by global warming.

 

"Will we watch as catastrophic disruption to Earth's environment and her people occurs on an unimaginable scale? Or will we change course and work together to mitigate the effects of global warming?" she said in a challenge to those in Bali.

 

"As major polluters, industrialized countries have a moral responsibility to assist Africa and the rest of the developing economies by sharing technology to reduce our vulnerability and increase our capacity to adapt to global warming."

 

The 190-nation talks in Bali seek to launch two years of negotiations for a global agreement to fight climate change, to succeed the Kyoto Protocol after its first phase ends in 2012.

 

Maathai was famed for leading the struggle to save Kenya's forests from illegal land grabbing. She now leads a global campaign to plant a billion trees which will soak up 250 million tons of carbon dioxide warming the atmosphere.

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BEIJING, Dec 14 (Reuters) - High altitude glaciers in China's remote west have shrunk by up to 18 percent over the last five years due to global warming, state media said on Friday, citing preliminary results from an on-going survey.

The shrinkage was most evident in two areas in the far Western region of Xinjiang and in part of Tibet, the official Xinhua news agency said.

"The change of glaciers is in fact a manifestation of the pressure upon China's environment from global warming," it quoted Ding Yongjian, a Chinese Academy of Sciences research fellow, as saying.

"Global warming has led to an increase in the average temperature in the western area of China over the past few decades. This has caused the glacial shrinking, a thawing of frozen earth and worsening arid conditions," it paraphrased him as saying.

China is set to overtake the United States as the world's top emitter of carbon dioxide as early as this year, and is under rising international pressure to curb emissions from its factories and vehicles.

But Beijing says its domestic energy efficiency programme is helping cut its contribution to climate change and offered to do more in return for clean technology from the developed world.

Its team has been widely praised at U.N.-led climate talks in Bali for a positive and cooperative attitude. (Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Jeremy Laurence)

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IAMI, Dec 13 (Reuters) - In less than 50 years, oceans may be too acidic for coral reefs to grow because of carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels by humans, according to research released on Thursday.

And unless still rising carbon dioxide emissions fall in the near future, existing reefs could all be dying by 2100, scientists said.

Australia's Great Barrier Reef, the world's largest coral expanse, and Caribbean reefs will be among the first casualties, according to the scientists who worked on a major coral project worldwide.

The study, to be published in Friday's issue of the journal Science, should serve as a warning to delegates to a U.N. climate conference in Bali, Indonesia, this week, the researchers said.

"We need rapid reductions in carbon dioxide levels," said Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, a marine science professor at Australia's University of Queensland and a lead author of the study.

"The impact of climate change on coral reefs is much closer than we appreciated," he said in a telephone interview from Australia. "It's just around the corner."

The study found emissions of carbon dioxide, the main "greenhouse" gas contributing to global warming, are boosting acidity so much that sea water covering 98 percent of all coral reefs may be too acidic by 2050 for some corals to live, and while others may survive they would be unable to build reefs.

"Unless we take action soon there is a real possibility that coral reefs, and everything that depends on them, will not survive this century," researcher Ken Caldeira said.

Coral reefs, delicate undersea structures resembling rocky gardens that are made by tiny animals called coral polyps, are important nurseries and shelters for fish and other sea life.

They are also considered valuable protection for coastlines from high seas.

Reefs are a critical source of food for millions of people and are important for tourism from Australia to the islands of the Caribbean and the Florida Keys.

MEDICAL TREASURE

They produce $375 billion a year in economic value worldwide, according to The Nature Conservancy environmental group, and are considered a storehouse of potential 21st century medicines for cancer and other diseases.

The polyps secrete calcium carbonate to build the stony base of the reef. Corals grow slowly, as little as half an inch (one cm) per year and the fragile structures they create are easily damaged by ship groundings, storms and other threats.

The researchers, who based their work on computer simulations of ocean chemistry, said about one-third of carbon dioxide, or CO2, put into the atmosphere is absorbed by the ocean, slowing global warming but polluting the sea.

The CO2 produces carbonic acid, the substance that gives soft drinks their fizz. The acid reduces concentrations of carbonate-ions, which are critical to reef building.

Current levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are 380 parts per million, researchers said, but rising quickly as humans increase their emissions by burning fossil fuels.

If trends hold, the concentration could rise to 880 ppm by 2100. But even if atmospheric CO2 stabilized at 550 ppm, which would take a concerted international effort, no existing coral reef could survive, the researchers said.

"We have the world at stake here. It's a global emergency," said Hoegh-Guldberg. "We've got to have (CO2) levels falling by 2015."

Australian and Caribbean reefs are at the greatest risk because they already have lower carbonate-ion concentrations and therefore would "reach critical levels sooner," he said.

The research should serve as a warning to those who look after reefs to ramp up the fight against other threats to them, which include overfishing, pollution from nearby land and a host of diseases, the researchers said.

"We need to think of this as the straw that broke the camel's back," said Peter Sale of the United Nations University. (Editing by Michael Christie and Richard Meares)

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AN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Clouds at the edge of space are showing the effects of climate change, scientists said on Monday.

These so-called polar mesospheric clouds are occurring more often and appearing at lower latitudes than they used to, researchers reported at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

 

"It won't affect people, but we're causing the outer part of the atmosphere to change, which means we are changing the entire atmosphere, which is important to know," said James Russell III, a scientist from Hampton University in Virginia.

 

The build-up of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane in the upper atmosphere may be responsible for the cloud changes, scientists said at a news conference.

 

Increased carbon dioxide cools the upper atmosphere and makes it easier for ice crystals to form. Methane reacts with oxygen to form water vapor.

 

The clouds, made of ice crystals formed around dust particles more than 50 miles above Earth's surface, form in conditions 100,000 times drier than the air in the Sahara and 100,000 times lower pressure than the surface of the planet.

 

This means that temperatures need to be extremely cold -- at least minus 210 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 134 Celsius) -- for the clouds to form. As increased carbon dioxide causes the temperature to drop and increased methane produces more water vapor, more clouds form.

 

"The clouds are an exquisite thermometer," said Scott Bailey, a scientist from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

 

Carbon dioxide and methane are responsible for trapping solar radiation and heating the planet when they build up in the lower atmosphere. The carbon dioxide and methane building up in the mesosphere is above where the greenhouse effect is taking place.

 

The polar mesospheric clouds don't contribute to climate change, but are indicators that humans are affecting even the farthest parts of the Earth's atmosphere.

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Greenland ice sheet melted at a record rate this year, the largest ever since satellite measurements began in 1979, a top climate scientist reported on Monday.

 

"The amount of ice lost by Greenland over the last year is the equivalent of two times all the ice in the Alps, or a layer of water more than one-half mile deep covering Washington DC," said Konrad Steffen of the University of Colorado at Boulder.

 

Using data from military and weather satellites to see where the ice is melting, Steffen and his colleagues were able to monitor the rapid thinning and acceleration of ice as it moved into the ocean at the edge of the big arctic island.

 

The extent of the melt area was 10 percent greater than the last record year, 2005, the scientists found.

 

Greenland is about one-fourth the size of the United States and about 80 percent of it is covered by the ice sheet. One-twentieth of the world's ice is in Greenland; if it all melted it would be equivalent to a 21-foot (6.4 meter) global sea level rise, the scientists said.

 

One factor in the speed-up of Greenland's ice melt is an increase in cylindrical shafts in the ice called moulins.

 

These huge tunnels in the ice act like drains and appear to let the ice sheet respond more rapidly than researchers expected to spikes in temperature at the beginning of the annual warm season, Steffen said.

 

In recent years, melting has started earlier in the year than normal. Air temperatures on the ice sheet have risen by about 7 degrees F (3.9 degrees C) since 1991, mostly because of the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the scientists said in research presented at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

 

This is in keeping with persistently gloomy news about the state of the Arctic this year. In October, a U.S. government "report card" found less ice, hotter air and dying wildlife.

 

In May, a U.S. expert at the National Snow and Ice Center in Colorado found that Arctic ice cap is melting much faster than expected and is now about 30 years ahead of predictions made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

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SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - By 2040, climate change will have melted the glaciers of Glacier National Park in Montana and the spring snowpack in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, scientists said on Tuesday.

 

"People talk about a tipping point, but we've been there and done that," said Tim Barnett, a researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California and speaker at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

 

About 15,000 researchers have gathered in San Francisco this week to discuss earthquakes, water resources and planetary science, but climate change was the topic of the day.

 

Barnett studies snowpack at high altitudes in the Western United States and estimates the region's snow accumulation decreased an average of 20 percent between 1950 and 1999.

 

Only about one quarter of this decrease can be reliably explained by natural temperature variations. Computer ing shows the remainder is "a slam dunk" attributable to human activity, said Barnett.

 

About 50 percent of the fresh water consumed by people worldwide comes from mountains, so the rate at which snowpack is disappearing is worrying, said Daniel Fagre, an ecologist who works for the U.S. Geological Survey in Glacier National Park in Montana.

 

Fagre said only about 25 of 150 glaciers that once dotted Glacier National Park remain. Initial data projected that, for the first time in more than 1,000 years, the park would be without ice floes by 2030, but more recent estimates project the icebergs may be lost even before then, Fagre said.

 

"The glaciers of Glacier National Park will be gone in our lifetimes," Fagre said, noting that big horn sheep now graze in the park locations where glaciers once stood.

 

Scientists say climate change is caused by carbon dioxide which traps heat in the Earth's atmosphere and raises temperatures. Other speakers at the meeting said climate change is also a cyclical process that accelerates once it has begun.

 

For example, as snow melts on mountain peaks, it exposes the surface of the Earth, which is darker in color and absorbs more of the sun's radiation, said Thomas Painter, an assistant professor at the University of Utah.

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NUSA DUA, Indonesia (Reuters) - Humans must help animals and plants adapt to a warmer world, environmentalists said on Thursday, because it is too expensive to rebuild entire ecosystems and their loss makes people even more vulnerable.

 

Conservation efforts should focus on protecting a variety of the most resilient or adaptable communities, and providing protected corridors of land or sea to allow species to shift habitats if their old range becomes unliveable, they said.

 

"The scale of the problem means we cannot effectively intervene. We have to look to nature to help itself," Rodney Salm, director of tropical marine conservation at The Nature Conservancy, said on the sidelines of U.N. talks in Bali on tackling climate change.

 

Traditionally, protection efforts often focused on the best-preserved areas of plant or animal life, but these are not always the best positioned to adapt.

 

For example, mangrove swamps at the edge of plains might be overlooked by environmentalists because they are easily accessible to people living nearby and so often in bad condition, while remote outcrops below steep hills can seem better havens of biodiversity, Salm said.

 

But to survive warming seas, the plants will need the room to retreat slowly inland that flatter areas offer. And experts say humans need mangroves to protect them from storm surges and slow the impact of rising oceans.

 

"Nature is relying on us. In addition to reducing emissions, we need to help natural systems adapt to climate change in order to sustain the processes that make life liveable," said Stephanie Meeks, President and CEO of the Nature Conservancy.

 

"No matter how successful mitigation efforts may be, this planet and its people are already committed to a substantial amount of warming and associated impacts of climate change," she said.

 

Coral reefs, which nurture fisheries and have already suffered mass die-offs or "bleachings" because of warmer waters, are another system in urgent need of protection, Salm said.

 

Rather than trying to farm heat-resistant or adaptable corals, protection efforts should focus on reefs in water cooled naturally by shade or currents, and those positioned to supply larvae to repopulate damaged areas after a bleaching.

 

Pacific islanders already suffering the impact of global warming are working on projects to protect the ecosystems that support their traditional way of life, the President of the tiny South Pacific nation of Palau said.

 

Tommy Remengesau said fishermen and farmers already found it hard to judge weather patterns in a country that also lost vast swathes of its coral reefs in a massive global bleaching late last decade.

 

"The resiliency of our biodiverse natural systems will be critical to our ability in our efforts to adapt to the impacts of climate change that we all know are coming," he said.

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Florida, a major tourist magnet that is home to Miami Beach, the swampy Everglades and Disney World and other theme parks in Orlando, is particularly vulnerable to climate change because of its 1,350 miles of coastline.

 

The study estimated that tourism revenue alone could drop by $167 billion a year, or 2.4 percent of state income, if beaches disappear, the Florida Keys, Cape Canaveral spaceport and most of the Miami area end up under water.

 

Republican Florida Gov. Charlie Crist is among a growing list of state officials who have given up waiting for the federal government to take the lead on cutting greenhouse gas emissions and have passed their own measures to cap pollution by power plants and cars.

 

A New York-based environmental group, Environmental Defense, commissioned the Tufts study.

 

"It is false choice to say that we have to choose between our economy and the quality of our environment or our ability to confront global warming," said Jerry Karnas, Florida climate change project director for Environmental Defense.

 

"We believe we can create both new markets and new opportunities while we protect Florida for our future."

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LONDON (Reuters) - As many as 150 million people in the world's big coastal cities are likely to be at risk from flooding by the 2070s, more than three times as many as now, according to a report released on Tuesday.

 

Climate change, population growth and urban development will mean the number at risk will rise from the current 40 million while total property and infrastructure exposure is forecast to rise to $35 trillion -- 9 percent of projected global GDP.

 

The report from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, put together by disaster ing firm Risk Management Solutions and leading scientists, is the first part of the largest ever study on urban coastal flood exposure.

 

The report analyzed the vulnerability now and in the future of 130 port cities to a major flood, on a scale likely to occur once in 100 years.

 

Miami in Florida will remain the city with the highest value of property and infrastructure assets exposed to coastal flooding caused by storm surge and damage from high winds, the report said.

 

The city has exposed assets of $400 billion today. Those are projected to rise in value to over $3.5 trillion by 2070.

 

But with rapid economic development in Asia, Guangzhou in China will be the second most exposed city in terms of assets in 2070, followed by New York, Kolkata, Shanghai, Mumbai, Tianjin, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Bangkok, the report said.

 

GROWTH AND GROWING RISK

 

Population growth and urban development in coastal cities will increase the exposure, exacerbated by the effects of climate change and subsidence, the report said.

 

Scientists believe global warming will cause sea levels to rise and bring more frequent and severe storms and other natural disasters.

 

"This report raises crucial policy considerations, and highlights the urgency for climate change mitigation and risk-informed adaptation strategies at a city level," said Jan Corfee-Morlot, the OECD's senior policy advisor on climate change.

 

Policies to mitigate climate change will bring "precious time" for exposed cities to implement strategies to adapt to and protect themselves from the higher risk of flooding, said Corfee-Morlot.

 

Projects to protect cities from flooding, such as the Thames Barrier built to protect central London from a major flood, typically take up to 30 years, said the report.

 

Policymakers from around the world are meeting this week in Bali to try to hammer out a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol to cut man-made emissions of carbon dioxide that are believed to lead to global warming.

 

Insurers, who end up paying a large part of the bill from any damage caused by climate change, should encourage policyholders to adopt methods to adapt to effects of global warming, the report said.

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JAKARTA (Reuters) - Climate change will hurt Indonesia's orangutan population, already under threat from the rapid rate of deforestation, by reducing their food stock, a leading conservation group said on Wednesday.

 

Dubbed as the last of Asia's great apes, orangutans once ranged the region but a recent UN environment program estimate said only between 45,000 and 69,000 orangutans remained in Borneo and 7,300 in Sumatra. The WWF said climate change would add to the pressure already caused by human-induced activities such as rampant illegal logging and massive conversion of forests into plantations.

 

"A longer dry season will reduce the abundance of fruits and will negatively impact orangutan populations because females are more likely to conceive during periods when food resources are not limited," the WWF report said.

 

"Climate-change induced fire will also negatively impact orangutan populations by fragmenting their habitat and reducing the number of fruit bearing trees, which can take many years to mature and fruit." Environmentalists say rampant illegal logging, lethal annual forest fires and the massive conversion of forests into plantations for palm oil and pulp wood have helped place orangutans on the world's list of endangered species.

 

"We have seen an example in East Kalimantan, where there was once an abundance of fruits at the beginning of the year followed by a long period of massive shortage," WWF conservationist Chairul Saleh told Reuters at the launch of the report.

 

"This affected migration patterns and reproduction," he said, "It has hurt the population of orangutans there."

 

A United Nations report in 2002, which raised alarm about the plight of the apes, had projected that most of the habitat suitable for orangutans would be lost by 2032. In February, UNEP had put the date at 2022.

 

Saleh warned that a combination of rising temperature and deforestation would drive thousands of orangutans out of the forests into villages and plantations to look for food.

 

"It's happening. Already orangutans are invading plantations to eat palm oil seedlings and get killed for it," Saleh said.

 

"But what should they do? Their living space is shrinking and there is simply no food."

 

(Reporting by Adhityani Arga; editing by Sanjeev Miglani)

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CAPE TOWN (Reuters) - A global satellite system should come on line next decade, potentially saving billions of dollars and thousands of lives by boosting preparedness for natural disasters, a top scientist said on Wednesday.

 

Monitoring changes in climate, the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) should also help health officials prevent epidemics and guard against man-made environmental damage, said Jose Achache, head of the group behind the project.

 

"I'm an optimistic guy. So, I think in ten years from now we'll have a fully operational and fairly complete GEOSS," Achache, director of the Geneva-based intergovernmental Group on Earth Observations, told Reuters.

 

He spoke as ministers and officials from 70 countries assessed progress on the Internet-like monitoring system, which links ocean buoys and satellites to reduce vulnerability to disasters and environmental change.

 

He said technology had already significantly reduced tolls from disasters, and GEOSS would take that further.

 

"We've come a long way. The best example we can give today is this tragic hurricane in Bangladesh two weeks ago, where we had to count the victims by thousands," he said.

 

"But, if you think about it, 15 years ago the same hurricane killed 140,000 people and 15 years before the number was 500,000."

 

Achache said the fewer s from Hurricane Sidr was directly due to better preparedness, heightened global observation and sharper ing, which allowed authorities to track the hurricane and better forecast its intensity.

 

He said GEOSS could also help authorities control outbreaks of contagious diseases like cholera and meningitis by monitoring environmental conditions where they occurred.

 

It will be able to gauge human environmental impact amid global concerns of accelerating climate change, such as that potentially caused by an Indian proposal to divert river flows to irrigate arid land, he said.

 

But Achache said a "huge task" remained ensuring the complex GEOSS system, officially only two years old, will work. Securing funding remained a challenge as well, he said.

 

"I guess we'll have to demonstrate (that) it's useful, that it is providing benefits to society," he said.

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NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. emissions of the gases blamed for global warming fell 1.5 percent in 2006 on mild weather and high fossil fuel prices, the statistics arm of the Department of Energy estimated on Wednesday.

 

President George W. Bush said in a release that the drop kept the country "well ahead" of his greenhouse gas intensity goal, as measured by the amount of such gases emitted per unit of economic activity.

 

But U.S. emissions remained much higher than they were in 1990, a key year in international efforts to fight climate change because it is the baseline year for the U.N.'s Kyoto Protocol. Rich countries that signed the pact have to cut their emissions at least 5 percent under their 1990 levels by 2008 to 2012.

 

U.S. greenhouse gas emissions last year fell to about 7.08 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, the DOE's Energy Information Administration estimated. It was the first annual fall in U.S. emissions since 2001, when tourism travel slowed after the airplane attacks in New York and Washington, and the third since 1990.

 

Unseasonably cool weather in the summer and warm weather in the winter kept power demand flat last year which reduced emissions of CO2 from power plants, while higher prices for energy cut emissions from industry and cars, the report said.

 

The annual report was released ahead of a meeting of delegates from 190 countries in Bali, Indonesia, next month to decide how to bind outsiders including the United States and China into a U.N.-led fight against climate change.

 

"United States looks forward to working with partners to reach consensus on a 'Bali Roadmap' at the upcoming U.N. meeting on climate change in Indonesia," Bush said in the release.

 

U.S. TACTICS

 

The United States, which since the beginning of the oil age has emitted more of the gases than any other country, does not regulate the gases scientists say could spark an increase in ly storms, droughts and floods. Bush pulled the country out of the Kyoto pact, saying it would hurt the economy and unfairly leave rapidly developing countries without limits.

 

Instead, Bush set a goal in 2002 of cutting greenhouse gas intensity 18 percent by 2012. The intensity fell last year by 4.2 percent, or more than double the average 2 percent decline since 1990, and has fallen about 10 percent from 2002 to 2006, the EIA said.

 

But Phil Clapp, president of nonprofit group the National Environmental Trust, said Bush is on the defensive ahead of Bali because Australia, the only other rich country not to sign Kyoto, may soon ratify the pact.

 

"That gives the Bush administration every incentive to take credit even for declines in greenhouse pollution that are due to weather and $3 a gallon (gasoline) prices," he said in an interview.

 

The report said U.S. emissions of gases, including CO2, methane and nitrous oxide, were 15.1 percent higher last year than in 1990.

 

And as energy demand and the U.S. population increase, the country's CO2 emissions, which account for more than 80 percent of the gases, should rise at an average annual rate of 1.1 percent from 2004 to 2030, it said.

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OSLO (Reuters) - This year is set to be the sixth warmest since records began 150 years ago, cooler than earlier predicted which means a slight respite for European ski resorts or bears trying to hibernate.

 

"2007 will likely be near equal with 2006, so joint sixth warmest year," Phil Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit at Britain's University of East Anglia, told Reuters.

 

The unit, which provides global data for the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), had predicted a year ago that 2007 could be the warmest worldwide since reliable records began in the 1860s. It cut the prediction to number 2 in mid-year.

 

A sizzling start to 2007, blamed on a combination of global warming and an El Nino warming of the Pacific Ocean that meant an abnormally warm winter in the northern Hemisphere, tailed off as the El Nino ended early.

 

Jones predicted that 2007 would be beaten by 1998, warmest ahead of 2005, 2003, 2002 and 2004. The U.S. space agency NASA says that 2005 was fractionally warmer than 1998.

 

The unusually warm start to the year was partly blamed for heating the Atlantic and cutting the extent of Arctic sea ice to a record low in summer. It also disrupted crop growth.

 

Many of Europe's Alpine ski resorts -- starved of snow a year ago -- have opened. In Switzerland 48 resorts, or more than half the total, opened about 10 days ago after good early snows and freezing temperatures.

 

In northern Europe, resorts such as Hafjell have opened weeks before last year, when temperatures were too high even for snow-making machines.

 

DOZING OFF

 

And bears in a Bulgarian conservation park are starting to doze off for winter hibernations, around the normal time, after last year's mild winter badly disrupted their sleep.

 

"Four of the bears are sleeping already. The weather was a bit warm but last week it became colder and it snowed so they have fallen asleep," said Raya Stoilova of the "Four Paws" foundation of 24 bears in a conservation park.

 

The U.N. climate panel has blamed human activities, led by burning fossil fuels in power plants, factories and cars for s global warming. Eleven of the 12 years from 1995 to 2006 were among the 12 warmest years on record, it says.

 

The world's environment ministers will meet in Bali, Indonesia, from December 3-14 to seek ways to widen the fight against climate change.

 

They will aim to launch two years of talks on a new climate deal to succeed the U.N.'s Kyoto Protocol and seek more involvement by Kyoto outsiders such as the United States and big developing nations led by China and India.

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By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON, Jan 31 (Reuters) - A water supply crisis is looming in the western United States thanks to human-caused climate change that already has altered the region's river flows, snow pack and air temperatures, scientists said.

Trends over the past half century foreshadow a worsening decline in water, perhaps the region's most valuable natural resource, even as population and demand expands in western states, researchers led by a scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography wrote in the journal Science on Thursday.

Up to 60 percent of changes in three key factors affecting the West's water cycle -- river flow, winter air temperatures and snow pack -- are due to human-caused climate change, they determined using multiple computer s and data analysis.

"Our results are not good news for those living in the western United States," wrote the team led by Tim Barnett, a climate expert at Scripps Institution, part of the University of California at San Diego.

"It foretells of water shortages, lack of storage capability to meet seasonally changing river flow, transfers of water from agriculture to urban uses and other critical impacts."

Barnett said computer s point to a looming crisis in water supply in the coming two decades.

It has been clear for some time that the climate has been changing in the western United States, and the question was whether it was due to natural variability or driven by climate change related to human-produced greenhouse gases and aerosols, the scientists said.

LOOKS LIKE PEOPLE

While the western United States has experienced natural wet and dry cycles in the past, current water flow trends differ in length and strength from past natural variations, the scientists found. The changes match those expected from the impacts of human activity on climate.

The researchers tracked water flows in three major western river systems -- Columbia, Colorado and Sacramento/San Joaquin rivers.

Changes over the past half century have meant less snow pack and more rain in the mountains, rivers with greatly reduced flows by summer and overall drier summers in the region, they noted.

"At this point in time, there's not much we can do to change that," said Barnett, who worked with experts at the U.S. government's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the University of Washington in Seattle and the National Institute for Environmental Studies in Japan.

"We're going to have to adapt our infrastructure and some of our societal needs to fit the way the world is changing," Barnett said in a telephone interview.

"Water shortages throughout the west, hydroelectric power reductions, heat waves -- the whole litany of things that go with global warming."

Another group of researchers, writing in the same journal, said leaders who set water policies worldwide must take climate change into account when planning for the future.

Until now, water policies have relied on the premise that historical water patterns could be counted on to continue. But human-induced changes to Earth's climate have begun to shift the averages and the extremes for rainfall, snowfall, evaporation and stream flows, Christopher Milly of the U.S. Geological Survey and colleagues said.

"Our best current estimates are that water availability will increase substantially in northern Eurasia, Alaska, Canada and some tropical regions, and decrease substantially in southern Europe, the Middle East, southern Africa and southwestern North America," Milly said in a statement.

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